Who made Who? An Empirical Analysis of Competitive Balance in European Soccer Leagues

Leif Brandes () and Egon Peter Franck ()

No 41, Working Papers from University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU)

Abstract: There is an on-going debate about the optimal degree of team solidarity in professional European soccer leagues. Support for a high degree of team solidarity has been coming from the theory of competitive balance. Within this theory, attendance has always been referred to as the endogenous variable, stating that diminished uncertainty of outcome will result in a lack of attendance demand. This paper takes a new approach towards the relation between competitive balance and attendance demand. First, we show why this relationship might be reversed. Based on seasonal average match attendance and different measures of competitive balance for several soccer leagues in Europe, this paper then presents results using vector autoregressive models and Granger causality tests. Regarding the analyzed relationship, our results clearly show the existence of heterogeneity across different leagues and for tiers within a league.

Keywords: competitive balance; sports leagues; Granger Causality; VAR models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C32 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
Date: 2005, Revised 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Published in: Eastern Economic Journal 2007, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 379-403.

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Who Made Who – An Empirical Analysis of Competitive Balance in European Soccer Leagues (2007)
Working Paper: Who made Who? An Empirical Analysis of Competitive Balance in European Soccer Leagues (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:wpaper:0041

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Zurich, Institute for Strategy and Business Economics (ISU)
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Leif Brandes ().